Sometimes I feel as if our generation that of the “millennial” college student is obsessed with having answers. And thanks to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and iMessaging we actually have answers at our fingers tips nearly twenty-four hours of the day, seven days a week.

If we don’t know what a word means we can look it up. If we forget when our meeting is we can ask a friend. If we need to find out how the symptoms of a planter’s wart present, we can find that too.

Informational data is readily available to us, and we’ve become programmed on asking questions and finding answers – and I would argue that we’ve become so inclined to ask questions and find answers that we speak too much.

We surround ourselves with so much noise that we’re actually inhibiting our capacity to think critically, and summarily, to know ourselves.

It struck me during the first week of classes how many of my professors provided a detailed description of the role of “critical thinking.” This is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, bumped, set, and spiked, bumped, set, and spiked, continuously volleying within our inner circle of classrooms and conversations that I fear we’ve become numb to what “critical thinking” actually entails.

I couldn’t define it. I couldn’t do a definition of “critical thinking” any justice; and I think part of the reason for this is because we’ve become trained to think and see the world “uncritically.”

Can you define critical thinking? Try it.

What did you come up with?

My understanding of it – after some very useful theorizing from professors of religious studies, African/African-American studies, and Spanish is this: a level of thought that requires the thinker, the interpreter (you!) to stop; analyze the situation, think about how other threads are connecting to the problem, project, or issue at hand, and see how these threads intertwine and knot together to form the subject of study.

What struck me the most about this re-conceptualization is the need to stop. So often, at least from my experience, we are taught to answer rapidly. We need to respond – we must fill the awkward silence of the seminar space.

We need to answer, we need to have a right answer, and we need to have it now.

This is entirely rushed, immature, and frankly, uncritical. Unfortunately pedagogy valorizes ends over efficiency. From my own experience, this looks like doing the homework to get it done, to get the checkmark, without actually understanding the processes at hand. This looks like “skimming” the reading in order to say I’ve read it without actually diving into the material in depth, and asking the most important question of the text: “So what?”

This was made real to me as I was working on a farm over the summer with my foreman Domingo. We were power-washing the walls of a farmhouse, well, Domingo was power washing, and I was watching. (To be fair it was my third day on the job.)

Domingo was meticulous. He put effort, enthusiasm, and tact into the art of hosing the green mold off of the white siding. He could have easily sprayed the water, maneuvering the house like Oprah Winfrey showering free books to her talk show audience, but he was patient: the water was focalized on a certain point until it was clean, until it was immaculately white.

Don’t forgo quality for the sake of satisfying your own need for an “answer” – understood loosely as approval, a good grade, and especially, a job.

It is OK not to know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. Do not sell yourself out for something that may not be the answer to the ultimate question, which I hope, we are all striving to answer: Who am I?

This is one question we cannot Google, and we cannot crowd source (entirely) for. The answer starts within, requiring a critical, self-reflective lens.